Jessica Craig-Martin Shoots Cindy Sherman’s Show

Last Tuesday, The New Yorker commissioned Jessica Craig-Martin to photograph the opening of Cindy Sherman’s MOMA retrospective. Craig-Martin’s work has a sly eye for colorful and revealing details of high-society parties, and her images from the MOMA show, above, playfully captured the curious relationship between Sherman’s art and its audience. “I noticed that some people would unintentionally mimic the pose in the photograph they studied,” she told me. “I tried to capture this unconscious imitation before awareness of my presence changed their stance.”

I asked Craig-Martin if her work had anything in common with Sherman’s society portraits. “There is a certain similarity at first glance: vanity, excess, vulnerability, arcane social ritual. Failed armor,” she said. But Craig-Martin’s photographs, which she takes at awards galas, charity benefits, and biennials, “are never portraits,” she said. “I see them as abstract studies of sequins, evicted mollusks, and air-conditioned mink. My camera wants to eradicate the personal.” By contrast, Sherman’s characters “are manifested in complete privacy. They live in her studio, waiting to be assembled and given an identity. She uses invented individuals as conduits to express her internal life. She proved that photography is not the truth, but the lie that tells the truth.”